Readers Save Legacy Library Content by Crowdsourcing Metadata Games
The British Library warned: by 2020, legacy content will remain undigitized and in danger of becoming inaccessible to future generations.
Universities, libraries, museums and archives own large amounts of undigitized material in the form of photographs, audio recordings and films that are at serious risk of being lost because of the wear time has put on them. Some are well-documented and just need to be digitized and tagged accordingly, but the problem is that a lot of the materials have little to no description in them. The job of tagging them requires collective input by multiple people to guarantee that the tags are as comprehensive and impartial as they possibly can. It a costly and time consuming task, and it cannot be accurately done by recognition software.
The task of proper tagging is of utmost importance for future access, so is there a way we can motivate people to contribute to the preservation of legacy content while we still have time? Well, games of course!